The absence of open standards and related technologies for medical device integration is impeding national efforts to revolutionize the delivery of safe, efficient, high-acuity patient care. Many of the anticipated benefits that could be achieved through integrating devices and IT systems of different vendors remain theoretical: they cannot be deployed clinically because a infrastructure to create these integrated clinical systems does not exist, nor is there a framework or methodology to assess the safety and suitability of innovative solutions that would benefit from the healthcare intranet infrastructure. Just as the Internet enabled the development of the World Wide Web and revolutionized communication, collaboration, and commerce, a healthcare intranet is needed to provide a platform to develop broad innovations in the safety and efficiency of healthcare delivery. Creation of an open, standards based healthcare intranet is the equivalent of a "medical moonshot" that, as with Web 2.0, will empower the global healthcare community to build smart "integrated" clinical environments by contributing innovative interoperable technologies and clinical knowledge to improve healthcare. This project will develop a prototype healthcare intranet by providing the necessary software and clinical expertise. Building on existing inter-disciplinary collaborations, a multi-institutional team will develop a plug-and-play open platform for medical device connectivity, as well as software tools to ensure the safe and effective connectivity of medical equipment and decision support engines to support clinical care. A vendor- neutral laboratory will be developed to integrate the building blocks provided by collaborators and to implement a set of clinical use cases to assess the intranet capabilities. Our approach includes (1) selection and analysis of clinical scenarios, (2) assess existing network technologies that can be adapted, (3) develop new software for the proposed healthcare intranet, incorporating best practices from successful interoperability efforts in other environments, (4) implement these systems in the MD PnP Lab, and (5) perform workflow evaluations and formal validation with use cases in a pre-clinical (lab) setting. The lab will serve long-term as a national resource for medical device interoperability R&D, testing and validation. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The absence of open standards and related technologies for medical device integration is impeding national efforts to revolutionize the delivery of safe, efficient, high-acuity patient care. This project will break through that barrier by providing sharable implementations, tools, and a prototype platform to enable innovation and error-resistance through device interoperability, to improve patient safety and healthcare efficiency.